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From Where There Is no Return

Alberto García-Alix (León, 1956) is one of the most representative photographers of the Spanish artistic scene in recent decades. National Photography Prize in 1999, his thirty-year career is a history of the social and cultural changes experienced since the Eighties in Spain, taken from an autobiographical point and opposed to stereotypes.

This exhibition traces the routes taken by the protagonists of GATEPAC, the Grupo de Artistas y Técnicos Españoles (Group of Spanish Artists and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture) which was founded in 1930 in Zaragoza. Its purpose is to highlight the international approval and prestige of both the group and its magazine, A. C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea (A. C. Documents of Contemporary Activity), from whose pages innovation in European modernism in art and architecture spread.

Dissidances

This first major retrospective of Nancy Spero (Ohio, USA, 1926) carries the suggestive title: Dissidances. She is one of the most radical artists linked to feminist art, both in her proposal as in her political discourse. The choice of the title refers to dance, a central motif of the artist's work that extends into both social and cultural commitments. In this way, Spero approaches her work from a critical stance towards the contemporary political situation and does so from an exploration of the body as a tool that formulates her discourse. For this she produces a graphical language, specifically female, representing the capacity of women to transform their own space.

To summarise so far the exhibitory history of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía at the Abbey de Santo Domingo de Silos, this exhibition shows the work of each of the twenty-four Spanish artists who have participated until now. This project started in 1998 through the collaboration between the Ministry of Culture, the Monastery of Santo Domingo Silos and the Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Burgos. Entitled Silensis, this exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover the excellent relationship that has developed over all these years between the many contemporary artworks exhibited here and the historical space of the Abbey de Silos itself.

Escultura

Sculptor, painter, illustrator and writer, Evaristo Bellotti (Algeciras, 1955) has consolidated a personal sculptural language over the past three decades. By not being subject to stylistic boundaries but open to the exploration of new possibilities he has been placed in the front line of the sculptural language renewal. Bellotti expresses an interest in Greco-Roman archaeological references and in the Mediterranean collective memory which manifest in pieces that embody the idea of fragment or ruin. With escultura, Bellotti establishes his sculptural assertion and it is a tribute, in clear contrast to the vertical, to the "endless column" of his admired Brancusi.

The exhibition Machines & Souls. Digital Art and New Media explores the convergence between science, art, technology and society at the beginning of the twenty-first century to reflect on the transformations that underlie the practices carried out by the artists that are part of this exhibition. The collection includes the work of 17 artists who have the use of digital technology as a tool in common, along with a long and distinguished artistic career. Some of them, like Antoni Muntadas, Daniel Canogar and Antoni Abad have already been part of previous exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Lives in Photography

Edward Steichen (Luxembourg, 1879 - Umpawa, USA, 1973) is one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography. In this first major posthumous retrospective of the artist in Europe his many contributions to various photographic fields are shown. The nearly 300 original photographs of this retrospective include the extraordinary diversity of his work, the result of a seventy-year career, over which the artist covered the main genres of this medium.

The Guided Visit

Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971) narrates through comics, stories that occur in the same place where the story he narrates happens. Ruiz lives and works between Barcelona and Berlin. His work focuses primarily on drawings, which he moves to the field of comics and cartoon to narrate stories and perform actions with multiple groups of people in different scenarios at street level. In this way a complex and evocative visual universe unfolds which opens multiple critical readings of a connected narrative with specific urban areas.

Noche Áurea

Javier Riera (Avilés, 1964) has an extensive career in which he explores the possibilities of artistic practice through a side that is as similar to sublime poetics as the geometries that pluck at the internal order of nature. Landscape is the main reference in his paintings and he is interested in non-visual aspects; he tracks with an introspective look man's connection with nature and stimulates reflection on their presence in the universe.

La dehesa del hoyo

This exhibition on Leonardo Cantero’s (Bilbao, 1907 - Madrid, 1995) photographs includes a selection of pieces that come from the Museum’s Collection. Cantero's works reflect his peaceful and everyday rural life from an anthropological scope. He studies architecture, but very early on is introduced into the world of photography and he joins the Royal Photographic Society in 1950. Cantero especially photographs his family farm La Dehesa del Hoyo, in the province of Ávila, between the Forties and Seventies. The property was a self-sufficient world where the photographer portrays his extensive family as well as the workers and their children.

Hotel Palenque

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is holding a solo exhibition of Robert Smithson (New Jersey, USA, 1938 - Texas, USA, 1973) as part of their collaboration with PHotoEspaña'08. Smithson began his career very young as a sculptor and experimental artist and at only 21 had his first solo exhibition. From his early death at age 35, his work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions at places such as the Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Venice Biennale.

King Arthur’s Court

Magdalena Abakanowicz (Falenty, Poland, 1930) is one of the Polish artists with the biggest international presence. The universe that Abakanowicz has created is inhabited by groups of human figures, fragments of humans or plants that occupy a geography between reality and dreams, mythical memories, literary characters that are evocations of her childhood world. Her work is also marked by the experience of a country ravaged by war and living in a totalitarian regime under the Soviet orbit. A compendium of images that the artist channels through a work full of mystery and power.

Military Court and Prison

Chen Chieh-Jen (Taoyuan, Taiwan, 1960) is one of the most important Asian artists on the contemporary international scene. In his work he presents a critical reflection on the strategies of power, with which he explores the recent history of his country and rescues specific situations that highlight control devices, violence, subjugation and alienation, while exploring with artistic languages the complex relationships between visual image and power.

The quality, diversity and uniqueness of Xavier Mascaró’s (Paris, 1965) sculptures, drawings, installations and stage designs make him one of the most important Spanish artists on today’s art scene. Mascaró graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in 1988. His sculptural career includes numerous experiences, works and exhibitions, both at a national and international level. Although his career began in the late eighties in the field of painting, his interests soon extended into volumetric and spatial sculpture. Initially, the material chosen to flesh out his work was cast iron, as can be seen in many of the pieces in this exhibition; a noble and ancient material, which he has managed to turn into a source of new sculptural solutions making it a typically Spanish tradition, alongside sculptors like Julio González, Oteiza, Chillida, Cristina Iglesias, Juan Muñoz and Susana Solano, while maintaining a personal language. Later Mascaró incorporates new elements and procedures into his works, such as stone, ceramics, resins, glass, bronze, textiles, plaster, tin, fibre, and even video, in this way extending the registers of its timeless and spiritual sculptural syntax.

Coordenadas y apariciones

José Damasceno (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1968) is one of the most internationally recognised artists on the current Brazilian art scene. Damascus has become the epitome of the role that sculpture and installation has had in Brazil compared to other art forms over the last forty years. Damascene belongs to a generation of Brazilian artists that has managed to create their own language without abandoning the influence of predecessors such as Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles by knowing how to fuse the very same sensory and interactive poetry with a personal universe where nods to surrealism and humour are frequent. Since the early nineties, Damasceno's work has been exhibited in such important institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo as well as in the Venice, Sydney and São Paulo Biennales.

The Collection from the Musée National Picasso Paris

The exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía of part of the Musée Nacional Picasso in Paris Collection, from whose archives over four hundred pieces have been selected, transcends the dimension of a conventional exhibition. It is the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of Pablo Picasso’s (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, France, 1973) career that has been shown until now in Spain. The result of the confluence of the pieces from both museums is a collection of essential creations of Picasso paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and a selection of documentary photographs from the archive of the painter, exhibited on the occasion of a major renovation and expansion of the Parisian site. The Musée Nacional Picasso in Paris was opened in 1985 in order to present the collection of works donated by Picasso's heirs to the French State in 1979, they gave the state the right of 'first choice' between the different works that were held at the artist’s workshops. It therefore includes his most prized pieces which the artist did not want to give away, the "Picassos" by Picasso, and were later joined by a second donation, after the death of Jacqueline Picasso in 1986 and subsequent successions by more heirs, united in the Museum by an active policy of acquisitions.

Both flamenco, conceived as modern popular culture, and the artistic avant-garde arise during the late nineteenth century. The aim of this exhibition is to review for the first time the position of flamenco within the frame of visual culture, especially its relationship of mutual influence with avant-garde art and modernity.

Ester Partegàs’ (La Garriga, 1972) career began to take shape outside Spain with good critical reception, a momentum which facilitated the presentation of her projects in our country. Since her first exhibitions in the late nineties, Partegàs has developed a theme that explores the urban landscape of the consumer society. A multidisciplinary artist, she easily moves between drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, although in the formal development of her work, volumetric and spatial aspects persist which lead to a definition of the artist as a sculptor. In many of her pieces, Partegàs expresses her interest in the power of the word and its confrontation with the realm of the image. In this way the artist rearranges advertising messages and proposes an unnerving reading of public billboards or covers the heads of passers-by with branded bags, nullifying their identity. At other times she places the spectator in the waiting room of an airport and thus represents a 'no place' to nowhere.

During the last fifteen years, photography has gained a renewed vitality thanks in part to its use by many artists who do not call themselves photographers, but simply use this medium to build and develop a new artistic syntax. Since conceptual artists in the Sixties began to use photography to document and register, or as a contributing element, in their projects, actions and performances, this medium began to change the direction the discipline itself had imposed. In this way it freed itself from formal ties and orientated itself in other directions, until becoming a new artistic path along which different ways of critical thinking of reality circulated. The emergence in the mid-sixties of cibachrome, which introduced sizes and colour qualities hitherto unknown, and the recent shift from analogue to digital photography has opened technical possibilities reminiscent of the experiments that took place between 1834 and 1851, a key time in the origins of photography.

Andy Goldsworthy (England, 1956) is one of the most brilliant exponents of the generation after the emergence of Land Art. Since this trend emerged in the mid-sixties, Land Art takes on nature as sculptural material, interacting with landscape’s changing scene. The generation of artists to which Goldsworthy belongs have followed these channels to explore a natural poetry from a profound reflection on form, matter, energy, space and time.

Paula Rego (Lisbon, 1935) is one of the most important figurative painters on the international scene and one of the most lucid and combative artistic voices that has emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Rego's artistic production is rooted in personal experiences and memories, in sinister fantasies and in the history of art and literature. In the early fifties she moves to England to study at the Slade School of Fine Art and adopts London as her primary residence.

Gustavo Torner (Cuenca, 1935) is a self-taught artist. Deeply immersed in the world of culture, he stand out in the vast Spanish panorama during the Sixties by the wealth of material he uses in his work; full of formal and chromatic freedom. Along with Fernando Zóbel and Gerardo Rueda they establish the Escuela Conquense, one of the first initiatives in Spain, during the Sixties to introduce the new currents of modern art, with the founding of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca as a major initiative, Torner collaborated there since its creation.

Amy Cutler’s (New York, USA, 1974) work manifests in meticulous drawings and watercolours; with them she recreates a fascinating universe inhabited by women, in which -on an allegorical, surreal and feminist level- she plans certain founding ideas of a new world. Faced with the proliferation of digital drawing, Cutler has distinguished herself with manual work, increasingly polished, precise and conceptually more complex. The artist recreates female imagery made up of fantasy stories, similar to folktales that have been transmitted orally and written. In her work there is the intention of anthropological reconstruction with domestic heroines in a process of adaptation to the environment. Her protagonists are always women who appear in an organised group, working or in transit from a trip, pioneers or colonising powers of a world waiting to be discovered, achieving a very personal poetry, which circulates with an artistic greatness, either through prosaic or real scenes, or also through dreamlike scenes.

Carlos Pazos’ (Barcelona, 1949) exhibition ironically traces over thirty years of an artist’s career whose work is inserted within the frame of aesthetics, silence and emptiness. This reality is included in Pazos’ work as emptiness, there is no reference of art and the object always refers to fiction; for this reason the tension between collage and the representation of emptiness is one of the most interesting contributions of this artist. Facing the failure of modern utopia and the questioning of any system of representation, Pazos chooses to hide behind the mask of Narcissus, escaping in the accumulation of objects and merging with the abject.

Luis Gordillo (Seville, 1934) begins to become known on the national art scene in the Sixties when he establishes himself as one of the pioneers in the restoration of the treatment of figuration and the use of colour, inventing an artistic language that becomes a reference to a later generation of artists. His aesthetic proposal questions itself on the reflection of the subject, the relevance of the process faced with the product and the theory of perception. His work and creative process define an open artistic journey, leaving traces of a continuous challenge with which he seeks clarity in the expression of his inner tensions.

The last seven years of the life of Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris’, better known from the 1920s as Le Corbusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1887 - Provence, France, 1965), were bound by deep ties of friendship and cooperation with the Swiss Heidi Weber, owner of an interior design gallery in Zurich.

Coinciding with the festival of photography PHotoEspaña 2007, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía proposes a selective journey through photographs from its Collection. The selection of photographs shown in five different spaces and that have been established according to a reflexive link between the subjective perception of the spectator and the return of the look in the image.

Carlos Franco’s (Madrid, 1951) activity as an engraver has been carried out in a very restricted environment and produced through private commissions, which makes him not very well known by the general public, except for his etching illustrations for The Aeneid by Virgil. However nothing better explains the artist's technical strategy than this activity, with its different procedures and its endless potential for overlap and juxtaposition.

Alberto Peral (Santurce, 1966) belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the early nineties and was a protagonist in the renewal of Spanish art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since his first solo exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona in 1992 until today, he has created a journey of great conceptual consistency and a desire for formal experimentation that has led him to travel through a wide range of media, from drawing, photography or sculpture, to installation and video. With them he proposes a thrilling encounter between the poetic beauty of the most simple and essential shapes and the symbolic power they contain.

German conceptual artist Wolfgang Laib (Metzinger, Germany, 1950) began his career in the mid-seventies, after finishing medical school. He belonged to a family who had cultivated asceticism and made frequent trips to India and other Asian countries. He became interested in religion and mysticism from an early age which led him to delve into Eastern cultures and languages and to find, in art, the knowledge and the means to express his worldview. From then onwards he develops a work that is characterised by high purity and formal austerity. He uses natural materials with a strong symbolic and vital load, like beeswax, milk, pollen and rice, with which he intends to bring together art, nature and spirituality.

Movement and speed as a reference of modernity and the machine as a symbol of technological progress have been around since early avant-garde artistic discourse. But it is in the Paris of the Sixties where, focused around the Denise René gallery, a group of artists, many of them Latin-American, give programmatic basis to Kinetic Art. From this moment the kinetic factor is begun to be understood as a trend that seeks expression in the movement of the creative arts through various channels: shaping an illusion of a virtual movement in the optic impression of the spectator that does not really exist; inducing the spectator to move in space, to mentally organise the reading of a particular sequence, or performing real movements of images through the use of motors.

Darío Villalba (San Sebastián, 1939) is a benchmark reference in the development of art after the period of informalist abstract that developed in Spain in the late fifties. In the mid-sixties Villalba develops a very personal and radical language through the use of photography as artistic support. This unusual use of photography distances him from the Pop Art and Conceptual Art trend of using image. Villalba decides to adopt the photographic frame as a painting, as a support suitable for collecting emotions and impulses that he needs to transmit, through paint strokes, fragmentation and modification of frames or hiding or revealing images. These images are taken from files or magazines, or from photographs taken by him; they are selected, fragmented and decontextualised, and used as an iconographic source, allowing him to break free from manual execution and become more involved in the intention than the action, always with a huge linguistic freedom.

Carmen Laffón (Seville, 1934) will exhibit in the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos after an extensive retrospective that the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicated to her in 1992. The National Arts Award in 1982 and intellectual fellow at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando) since 1989, Laffón is a figurative painter and sculptor. Her palette encompasses a range of sensual and luminous colours with which she is able to instantly capture the world and internalise it. Her work, produced mainly with charcoal, pastels and oil, includes portraits, still life, everyday objects and, most particularly, landscapes. Since the mid-nineties Laffón brilliantly explores the world of sculpture. Her works are in such major collections as MoMA, the Juan March Foundation and the Bank of Spain.

This project, created specifically for the Palacio de Cristal, presents pieces from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection in a context that explores the connections and interaction between the pieces exhibited and the exhibition space. Participating artists -Cristina Iglesias, Mario Merz, Susana Solano and Per Barclay- use different artistic vocabularies to place the spectator before structures that relate to living space, expressing introspective and uniquely poetic architectural worlds.

Since 1968 Chuck Close (Monroe, United States, 1940) has been creating stunning large portraits from photographs taken of people’s faces. Close graduated from Yale University and worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. His work was first exhibited at the MOMA, New York in 1973. In 1967 Close abandons his Abstract Expressionist painting style which he inherited from his college years. In the late sixties, along with other contemporary artists he begins to subvert modern abstraction transforming it into figuration and paving the way for what is now known as Postmodernism.

This exhibition is the first one dedicated to studying the role that artists played in the creation of magazines published during the Spanish Civil War. During those years magazines were the most important means of spreading ideologies; authentic laboratories that created propaganda which would be determinants in the formation of a wartime culture. The magazines attracted writers, artists, photographers and typographers, engaged in an essentially experimental, creative activity.

Kiwon Park’s (Cheong-ju, North Korea, 1964) work is intrinsically related to a concept of space naturally rooted in Eastern thought. His great interest is in empty space, defined by the floor, ceiling, walls and light. A space that he uses as sculptural material and which he intends to make more alive and emphasise. In his work he transforms existing spaces into new illusory and abstract spaces, modifying formal elements, such as the texture, surface, colour and sense of volume. His installations become sculptures in themselves.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is dedicating this exhibition to Juan Soriano (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1920 - Mexico City, 2006), on the occasion of the 2005 Velazquez Prize. This exhibition was preceded by Juan Soriano. Retrospective. 1937-1997 which the Museum dedicated to him in 1997.

The Albers matrimony formed part of the Bauhaus school. Following the closure of the school in 1933 because of Nazi harassment, Josef Albers (Bottrop, Germany 1888 - New Haven, United States, 1976) was one of the first Bauhaus teachers to emigrate to the United States. Known for his writings on the theories of colour he continues teaching, inseparable from his artistic activity, in prestigious institutions such as the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Meanwhile, Anni Albers (Berlin, 1899 - Connecticut, United States, 1994) is one of the leading textile artists of the twentieth century, after training in the textile workshop at the Bauhaus, where she enjoyed the tutelage of teachers such as Paul Klee. This exhibition explores a very specific aspect of the Albers production, with works that narrate their devotion to pre-Hispanic cultures in Latin America as well as the enormous influence that the fourteen trips to Mexico, Cuba, Peru and Chile between 1934 and 1967, had over the work and life of the couple.

This exhibition is an overview to understand how the recording, transmission and reproduction technology of sound and images born in 1950, and technically different from cinema, became artistic media. It examines the influence of technology and mass culture in social and artistic changes in an era of cultural acceleration and proliferation of ideas. In this way 1968 marks a before and after, as that was the year when a relatively affordable portable television appeared on the market, opening up the media to a vast new group of people.

Howard Hodgkin (London, 1932), is one of the most active British artists on the international scene. Hodgkin describes his work as "paintings depicting emotional situations", where he tries to recreate the intensity of the experience. The artist works with his memory, revealing and concealing issues through overlapping layers of bright colours and distinctive markings, a process that can take several years.

Ixone Sádaba’s (Bilbao, 1977) work starts off the new programme of exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, entitled "Producciones". This programme is designed to develop projects specifically produced for the museum and carried out by artists whose career is beginning to come together, with the aim of stimulating and enhancing current creative activity.

Nature is Miguel Ángel Blanco’s (Madrid, 1958) field of work. His most important artistic and vital project, Biblioteca del bosque, begins in 1985 and consists of box-books containing, and sealed with glass, natural elements -botanical minerals, animals, entomologies- preceded by a few pages introducing us to these materials through drawings, prints or photographs. Box-books are, for the artist, microcosms, new landscapes that express nature in all its phenomenology and in all its geographical and symbolic extension.

Gordon Matta-Clark’s (New York, United States, 1943-1978) work has an expressive multidimensionality and a formal complexity in a New York dominated by the reductionism of Minimal and Conceptual Art. The artist develops his art production in the art of action, the objectification of space shared by sculpture and architecture, and especially in redefining the idea of landscape as an interactive place where the social, historical, ideological and natural coexist. Matta-Clark shows that it is possible to fuse matter, form, perception and idea into urban landscape. After a period spent studying architecture, he led the way as a visual artist, becoming one of the most important conceptual artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Artist Manuel Valdés Blanco, known as Manolo Valdés (Valencia, 1942), boasts a long career that gets underway at the beginning of the Sixties. From 1964 onwards his work develops as a member of Equipo Crónica, to which the then Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicates an exhibition in 1989. The group, influenced by Pop Art, defines the Spanish Art of that period and represents a critique and lucid consideration of the relationship between art and society. After 1981, Valdés embarks on a fruitful solo career. Twenty-five years on, and for the first time in Spain, the Museo Reina Sofía presents a complete retrospective of this phase in his artistic output.